Climate Change

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To report or not to report GHG emissions in occupied territories. A practical approach for having a more accurate world count of global GHG emissions.

September 12, 2023

Romina Edith Pezzot

Climate change is a global environmental problem that needs the participation and cooperation of all States to effectively protect the Earth’s climate system for present and future generations. Despite the high number of States Parties that the UN climate change regime has, the regime is silent about who should report the green-house gases (GHG) emissions in occupied territories. The side effects of this legal lacuna, as described by Yiokasti Mouratidi, are the inconsistent approaches to this problem by the concerned States and consequently the possible double counting of GHG emissions or the lack of information if neither the Occupying Power nor the Occupied State report them. As obtaining information on GHG emissions could be challenging in that context, some reflections on the topic are needed. The importance of adopting mitigation measures during occupations The UN climate change regime has many areas of action (Dupuy and Viñuales, p. 187). One of them is mitigation, which has two essential components. On one hand, mitigation comprises of those policies and actions to…

General Comment No.26 on Children and the Environment – A Milestone in International Human Rights Law?

September 11, 2023

Aoife Nolan

22 August 2023 saw the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child publish its much-anticipated General Comment No.26 on Children’s Rights and the Environment, with a Special Focus on Climate Change (GC26). The General Comment sets out a framework for a child rights-based approach to environmental protection, addressing issues ranging from access to justice and remedies…

Governing reliance on carbon dioxide removal: The role of climate litigation

September 8, 2023

Lucy Maxwell

Alyssa Glass

The world’s leading scientists are clear: limiting global warming to 1.5°C involves ‘rapid and deep and, in most cases, immediate greenhouse gas emissions reductions in all sectors this decade’. Yet global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are ‘woefully insufficient to meet the temperature goal of the Paris Agreement’. In this context, many climate advocates are…

Whose emissions are these anyway? The Paris Agreement and greenhouse gas emissions emanating from occupied territories: a case study of Ukraine, Georgia and Russia

July 26, 2023

Yiokasti Mouratidi

The Paris Agreement, hailed as a “historic agreement” to tackle climate change, does not directly address the impact that armed conflicts can have on climate change. One of the (many) unanswered questions is how greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions emanating from occupied territories are to be treated by the relevant Parties to the…

Litigating the Energy Charter Treaty at the European Court of Human Rights

June 16, 2023

Eoin Jackson

In June 2022. A group of young people lodged a claim with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) alleging that their rights under Article 2 and Article 8 of the European Convention were being violated by states' continued compliance with the controversial Energy Charter Treaty. This article will chart out a potential pathway to success…

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